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So, you want to be a darknet drug lord
- luciusdomitius 5y agoI absolutely love the cold pragmatism in his/her writing. It reads like a DIY spark plugs replacement guide :D
- Fatnino 5y agoI'm assuming it's a him because his handle is the masculine form of the Hebrew word for snake. But maybe that's there to throw us off the scent...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- j4yav 5y agoThis is a great article, I love reading stuff like this that goes into detail into interesting and unusual lives, whether criminal or not. Is there any collection of similar articles, related podcasts, or particular stories I should check out?
- skywal_l 5y agoI don't know if this is what you are looking for but I enjoyed this AMA to a bartender a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27979864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27979864.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- alsko 5y agoI really enjoy the Darknet Diaries podcast: https://darknetdiaries.com/ https://darknetdiaries.com/
- mertd 5y agoThe host is masterful at divulging the right amount of technical detail to keep both casual and tech savvy listeners engaged. He is also very good at finding good topics and getting hackers to talk on the podcast.
- rsync 5y agoIsn’t there a hidden service bbs/forum out there where the primary topic of conversation is opsec and anonymity applied in this manner? I thought I read (on hn) of such a community…
- greenie_beans 5y agonot a forum but this has good privacy and osint info: https://inteltechniques.com/podcast.html https://inteltechniques.com/podcast.html lots of content, you gotta weed through a lot to get the good stuff
- Melatonic 5y agoMostly still IRC chat interestingly enough
- spacemanmatt 5y agoAssuming this is credible, I'm glad my opsec intuition is not too far off. This is approximately what I expected.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoI guess that's part of the fun, figuring if the US government planted this or not.
- spacemanmatt 5y agoI'm more at contemplating what level of "kingpin" could run technical operations that tight and also move a buncha drugs. I think the stress might ruin my stomach in a week.
- eatonphil 5y agoReminds me of Evan Ratliff's The Mastermind [0] about Paul Le Roux building an illegal online pharmacy and how eventually he was caught. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41181600-the-mastermind https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41181600-the-mastermind
- rdelpret 5y agoOne of my favorite books!
- elliekelly 5y agoAlong the same lines there’s a German show (on US Netflix) called “How to Sell Drugs Online Fast” that’s loosely based on the true story of a teenager[1] who started an online drug business from his bedroom. It’s pretty funny and a bit Silicon Valley-esque. There’s also a documentary where he’s interviewed. I think it’s called “Shiny Flakes” which was the name of his website. [1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/03/german-teen-sold-one-tonne-of-drugs-from-his-mothers-flat https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/03/german-teen-so...
- runjake 5y agoIIRC, Shiny Flakes went back into the business after the Netflix show and ended up getting busted. Talk about horrible OPSEC.
- ugl 5y agoLike snoop from the wire using her profits from a (fictional) west baltimoreheroin selling conspiracy to,in fact, establish a west Baltimore heroin selling conspiracy.
- Malp 5y agoWow, there's a blast from the past. Here's another piece [0] by Ratliff about trying to go off the grid while orchestrating a manhunt for himself. It scratches the same spy-crime-opsec itch that the other links in this thread do, and left a lasting impression on 8-year-old me. [0] https://www.wired.com/2009/11/ff-vanish2/ https://www.wired.com/2009/11/ff-vanish2/
- spansoa 5y ago> This section tries to be as operating system independent as possible But if you are going to interact with Tor and setup hidden services, Whonix[0] is your best bet. The idea behind Whonix being that even if there's some javascript-based 0-day that tries to decloak you, it can't leak your naked IP, because it fails closed and everything is routed through Tor. [0] https://www.whonix.org/ https://www.whonix.org/
- MortenToudahl 5y agoIs it different than tails? As far as I understand tails routes all traffic through tor too, and cuts the connection if it cannot be done.
- FDSGSG 5y agoHuge difference. Whonix consists of two VMs, one where you actually work and another which acts as a "router" sending all of your traffic out over Tor. Code running in the work VM can't leak your IP even with root access.
- vmception 5y agoThat didn't answer their question. Nobody is advised to run Tails in a VM, only as the host OS, so the dual VM part isn't that relevant. I've used both, only pointing out how your response didn't match The article does briefly mention Tails and how it does a RAM rewrite upon shutdown for you > If you're planning to use TAILS, it will scrub the RAM for you automatically when you shut down.
- eightysixfour 5y agoThe dual VM part is the essential difference - if someone were to gain root to your Tails installation with a zero day they could decloak your IP. If you are running whonix that is not possible without also breaking out of the VM into the hypervisor.
- themark 5y agoTIL shitexpress.com exists as a service.
- chihuahua 5y agoIt's like MasterClass, but for people who are bad at expressing their feelings
- scandox 5y ago> Spreading disinformation about yourself takes time, but after a while the tapestry of deceptions will practically weave itself. Where the darknet meets linkedin.
- ______-_-______ 5y agoJoe Smith has endorsed you for a skill: Drug Lord
- rawoke083600 5y ago>If you want to have some fun at the expense of business in the short term, intentionally take your service offline periodically in order to mess up attempts to match your downtime with public information Wow, I would have never thought about that to use public-downtime to find/match your service.
- globular-toast 5y agoCheck out the ways people have tried to identify Satoshi Nakamoto to learn more about this and other ways you leak information.
- Daffodils 5y agoWhere can I find more about this?
- stjohnswarts 5y agojust google "how did satoshi stay anonymous" and you should find tons of info. it was pretty well known and widely discussed.
- rosndo 5y agoFWIW we don’t know if Satoshi remained anonymous. We just know that he wasn’t conclusively identified by relatively unsophisticated internet commenters and journalists. OTOH there were many times when Satoshi connected to IRC with non-Tor residential IPs, it’s possible that deanonymization was just one subpoena away.
- bduerst 5y agoYep, it's survivor bias to assume Satoshi's methods were effective, because he could be incarcerated or kidnapped or traced with his methods and it would not be general knowledge.
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- qvrjuec 5y agoThis is super interesting, most writeups I've seen similar to this focus more on hardening the server itself and not the adjacent OPSEC necessary like TOR best practices or hosting strategy.
- vmception 5y agoThere is a lot of information like this on Tor forums and Tor marketplaces that I've only seen there. Sometimes people that never looked casually dismiss the idea that there is obscure useful OPSEC information there. Selling guides like these for $.99 is a great way to get your marketplace reputation up fast, to sell bigger ticket items.
- dna_polymerase 5y ago> You also shouldn't go out and buy a Tesla. Living beyond your means is a key red flag that triggers financial and fraud investigations [..] Okay, so why would I go through all this trouble then? I could think of other hobbies to escape a "cookie-cutter" life.
- vmception 5y agoYou have to launder it like the article mentioned, it just glossed over that completely as its about the OPSEC. Its still better if you already have a lucrative clean-money life, which means it is easier to quickly intermingle uncleaned money into it.
- toss1 5y ago. . . and of course, if you already have a lucrative clean-money life, there's not much point to risking it all to get involved in dirty money activities It seems the best way to do it would be to be sponsored by the FBI or whatever in your country - use your expertise to setup a honeypot system with their prior knowledge and you'll feed them data when it is setup... they get info feed to collar criminals, no cost to their budget, are they going to care if you make your cut along the way? [note the "It seems" — I have zero experience with what the FBI may or may not require for such an operation]
- vmception 5y agoRight. Part of the goal of reducing corruption is having alternative behaviors that are more attractive But in any case there are lots of useful laundering techniques that can pass scrutiny Just wait for the next darknet pastebin to have that debate
- philwelch 5y agoThere’s nothing stopping the feds from double crossing you though. You could be the leader of a sovereign country and they will literally invade your country just to arrest you. That’s how they did Noriega.
- buffalobuffalo 5y agoOn the topic of darknet markets, I keep thinking that a darknet gold/hard currency market would be way more interesting than drugs. It would provide a way to convert crypto to real world fungible assets outside of the exchanges. Wonder why it has never been done.
- barnabee 5y agoThere’s https://bisq.network/ https://bisq.network/
- tjader 5y agoThere are such markets in the open, as trading gold and crypto is mostly legal, so where's the demand for a dark market for those?
- vidarh 5y agoThe point, I think,would be an on/off ramp that ignores KYC and isn't receptive to court orders to reveal customer information.
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago>... Keep in mind that the NSA will start scooping up all of your packets simply because you visited torproject.org. I wonder how true that is.
- Jalad 5y agoBased on a cursory glance, this looks to be true through the XKeyscore program [0] (CTRL-F Tor) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore
- sterlind 5y agoonly if you don't live in the Five Eyes. though I definitely wouldn't bet my freedom on it.
- chockchocschoir 5y agoWhen you're trying to cover your tracks, it's best to assume the worst at all times, even if it's unlikely. Besides, it's not like the NSA doesn't have the capability to scoop all packets from people they've seen visited torproject.org.
- 323 5y agoA big misconception that the author and others have is that if two countries don't have an extradition treaty it means that you won't be extradited. It doesn't work like that. All it means it that instead of you being more or less automatically extradited now a negotiation process starts between the two countries. Put another way: extradition is manual instead of automatic. Plenty of people were extradited from "no extradition treaty" to US. > One very important takeaway from this article should be that just because a country does not have a formal extradition agreement with the United States, does not mean that the country will not extradite you. https://www.expatriationattorneys.com/non-extradition-countries-expatriation/#Non-Treaty_Does_Not_Mean_No_Extradition https://www.expatriationattorneys.com/non-extradition-countr...
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y agoAnd also how much the US authorities want you. If the US really wants you, they have a very long reach (see Bin Laden in Pakistan).
- daniel-cussen 5y agoYeah, same as the British monarchy after the murder of Charles 2. Or James 2. But they tracked down the killers all the way to America, or so they say. Same with Stalin getting Trotsky in Mexico. But there's others who never were captured, Hannibal evaded Rome until they almost captured him, but he successfully killed himself so they never got him alive. There's many others on both sides.
- cbozeman 5y ago> Hannibal evaded Rome until they almost captured him, but he successfully killed himself so they never got him alive. I'm not sure if I'd put this one in the "W" column.
- giantrobot 5y agoSome say he escaped into the Los Angeles underground.
- praptak 5y ago> Keep in mind that the NSA will start scooping up all of your packets simply because you visited torproject.org. This particular one might not be true but the general spirit probably is. This is why I sometimes do things which a drug lord would do even though I am not one (I swear). It's for the benefit of possible-future me where I do have something to hide. The correlation of the time where you started using Tor extensively and the time a particular Darknet service started operating? Certainly a possible leak of a few precious bits of those ~30 bits that are needed to pinpoint you. It's a generalization of the rule that you should not restrict encryption to only those messages that are important.
- tormock 5y ago> This is why I sometimes do things which a drug lord would do even though I am not one (I swear). It's for the benefit of possible-future me where I do have something to hide. We need robots that do this constantly.
- B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago> You don't want to be like Ernest Lehmitz, a German spy during World War II who sent otherwise boring letters about himself containing hidden writing about ship movements. He got caught because the non-secret portion of his letters gave up various minor personal details the FBI correlated and used to find him after intercepting just 12 letters. That's an interesting story, this is the best I found about it: https://www.silive.com/news/2018/07/staten_island_wwii_espionage_c.html https://www.silive.com/news/2018/07/staten_island_wwii_espio...
- vpbusvltsmtk 5y agoI do how did you know that?
- Nadya 5y agoOpsec is incredibly difficult to get correct - especially in the long term. Many of the people who need to be getting it correct do not and the only reason they are not in front of a judge or serving time is simply because their government hasn't given a shit to so much as glance their way. Because if their government actually gave a crap to investigate they'd be found almost instantly. From doing stupid things like sharing photos of their pets to more mundane things like having very obvious hours of activity and using vocabulary that varies spelling regionally (eg: how you spell color/colour suddenly matters) or even worse using regional slang like a bunch of Australian slang. If you want to be a darknet drug lord my advice is of a different flavor: Don't let yourself become too big. Once a (or multiple) governments are after you it is very likely only a matter of time before you get caught. Not because the government is particularly good at tracking people down or somehow nearly omniscient but simply because you likely had or have terrible opsec and finding you is more trivial than you've led yourself to believe. If you believe they are already looking for you it's time to abandon everything and disappear. Live your life like it never happened and whatever you do don't pass on the torch. Let your work die and be buried and someone else build on top of the grave.
- digianarchist 5y agoI find DNMs fascinating and love reading about how founders are eventually caught. > Opsec is incredibly difficult to get correct - especially in the long term I'd say if you are doing it long term then you are doing it wrong. The longest surviving DNM by far was Dream which I speculate had some nation state backing it.
- Nadya 5y ago> I'd say if you are doing it long term then you are doing it wrong. I agree entirely but it also depends on your threat model. When making my post I didn't have DNM's in mind (though that's the context...) and was actually thinking about the abysmal opsec of many private tracker admins.
- tablespoon 5y agoI've always wanted to know more about spy tradecraft (e.g. dead drops, number stations, and the like), and this kind of has the same vibe as that.
- durnygbur 5y agoNice try, intelligence agencies. Drugs are illegal but still bought and sold which means the state has monopoly on their trade, while also has monopoly on escalation of violence. Fundamental condition is having plugs in the law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Without plugs one has immediate full attention of law enforcement and of competition.
- baconhigh 5y agonot bad for advice from 2015
- sterlind 5y agoTIL about doxbin [0], the site allegedly maintained by the author. apparently doxbin hacked The Hidden Wiki and deleted the links there to child porn, in a surprisingly wholesome bit of hacking. I'd love to play around with like, a CTF where one side sets up a hidden service and the other side has state-level access to try to uncloak it. something that simulates what powers the US has, e.g. red team has a limited number of raids it can do, ability to patch things into network cables or hack routers, while the blue team has several fake cloud providers in fake countries, a Monero testnet etc. would anyone else be down? 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxbin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxbin
- justaj 5y agoSure, sounds fun! So how do we proceed? I've noticed there is no contact information in your profile (mine lacks that too), so I've made a new public Matrix room: #torctf:matrix.org